My dad’s oil painting on a coconut was one of the inspirations for my rug.

I took a lot of inspiration for the colours around the horizon from this painting on driftwood too.

This shows the blocks that I sketched onto the hessian to plan it out.

When rag rugging the sea, I chopped up 7 different shades of blue to add to the pacific island fabric offcuts I got my hands on when I was there. I have been randomly rag rugging handfuls whilst working in rows. Occasionally I will rag rug a swathe of a distinct colour (the dark blue or very light green, for example) if I want it to stand out.

These are the colours which I’ve used so far for the sea – it’s a real mix of different shades of blue.

As you can see, I don’t have any problem using fabrics that fray in my rag rugs – it just adds texture.

You can see on the back of the hessian where I’ve added in a swathe of dark blue before filling in. This will stand out amongst the other blues.

Rather than just rag rugging in full rows, after a while I start rag rugging in chunks across the rug to make things a little less monotonous.

I made sure to include darker areas in the sea as “coral” banks.

It’s amazing how many different blue fabrics ended up in the sea.

The rag rug sea was coming along quite nicely…

And ta da! This is what the ocean looked like when it was fully rag rugged…

And here’s the sea a little closer up…

If you look nice and close, you can see that I’ve included some pink rags in the ocean to add a little interest. I like to think of them as fish swimming around.

Before heading onto the beach, I added in a line of dark grey to create more definition.

Here’s a close up of the edge of the sea. It looks pretty dark at this stage but it always becomes less stark when you add in rag rugging on the other side as just the tops will show.

And here is how the rug looked when I had a strip of the beach in place…

This is one of the fabrics that went into the beach. When it’s cut up you can’t tell the pattern at all – just the colours.

And this is another fabric that went into the Rag Rug Beach 🙂

Here’s a close up so you can see some of the different colours that have gone into the rag rug beach.

And an even closer shot… as you can tell, I love fabrics that fray!

Getting there slowly but surely!

This was when I’d finished about half of the beach. Fortunately I’d already cut up all the fabric for the second half of it.

Here I got a little bored and started rag rugging in blocks again. The lighting here looks a bit strange as it was a different time of day.

Shaggy rag rugging!!

Getting there slowly but surely…

The Fully Rag Rugged Beach!!

And here you can see a little bit more.

And everyone is always curious to see what the back of my rugs look like.

Here you can even see the back of the individual rags. I’m definitely going to add in more rogue colours further down the line.

The horizon looks a little stark here but it will look a lot less in your face once the rag rugging goes in above it. I’m planning to put in a white line above the navy.

I phased the horizon into the sky with a line of white rag rugging.

The white had a super cute small dandelion pattern on it that tied in with the ocean below and sky above.

When I was putting in the rag rug clouds, I completely ignored the advice I normally give out to rag ruggers that you should rag rug from one point in the hessian. If you rag rug in lots of places then it weighs down the rag rug in lots of places which makes it much harder to fill in any gaps (plus makes it pretty unwieldy). If I did the rug again then I would definitely do the clouds as I reached them in the sky.

You can see in this photo that I actually rag rugged the outside of each cloud before filling it in.

The clouds were made up of a mixture of white and grey rags to make them less one-dimensional.

Here’s how the rug looked after I’d rag rugged all three of the clouds. They look pretty big at this stage but as soon as I put in the blue sky around, they’ll shrink a lot.

After I’d put in the first row of sky, it was just a matter of continuing on. I mainly used men’s cotton shirts (including one of Christian’s that he kindly donated) and a blue and white patterned sheet.

And here’s the sky up close and personal 🙂

So now I have a slight confession to make… here you can see from the back that I actually made this rug in a very strange order. I ran out of the exact shade of blue I wanted for the top of the ocean so I left two or three rows empty and moved onto the horizon and sky while I kept an eye out for the colour I wanted. You can see the gap that I left from the back of the rug but it doesn’t really show from the front (although I obviously filled it in later).

Even close up, it’s difficult to see the gap I left.

Here’s a close up of the rag rug sky.

And here’s what the rag rug looked like after I’d covered the hessian entirely!